Andrei Chikatilo biography

Chikatilo was arrested for behaving suspiciously at a bus station at this time, but again avoided suspicion on the murder charges, as his blood type did not match the suspect profile, but he was imprisoned for three months for a number of minor outstanding offenses.

What was not realized at the time was that Chikatilo's actual blood type, type A, was different to the type found in his other bodily fluids (type AB), as he was a member of a minority group known as "non-secretors",

whose blood type cannot be inferred by anything other than a blood sample. As police only had a sample of semen, and not blood, from the crime scenes, Chikatilo was able to escape suspicion of murder. Today's sophisticated DNA techniques are not subject to the same fallibility.

Following his release, Chikatilo found work as a traveling buyer for a train company, based in Novocherkassk, and managed to keep a low profile until August 1985, when he murdered two women in separate incidents.

At around the same time as these murders, Burakov, frustrated at the lack of positive progress, engaged the help of psychiatrist, Alexandr Bukhanovsky, who refined the profile of the killer. Bukhanovsky described the killer as a "necro-sadist", or someone who achieves sexual gratification from the suffering and death of others. Bukhanovsky also placed the killer's age as between 45 and 50, significantly older than had been believed up to that point. Desperate to catch the killer, Burakov even interviewed a serial killer, Anatoly Slivko, shortly before his execution, in an attempt to gain some insight into his elusive serial killer.

Coinciding with this attempt to understand the mind of the killer, attacks seemed to dry up, and police suspected that their target might have stopped killing, been incarcerated for other crimes, or died. However, early in 1988, Chikatilo again resumed his killing, the majority occurring away from the Rostov area, and victims were no longer taken from local public transport outlets, as police surveillance of these areas continued. Over the next two years the body count increased by a further 19 victims, and it appeared that the killer was taking increasing risks, focusing primarily on young boys, and often killing in public places where the risk of detection was far higher.

Trial and Execution

The recently unfettered media of Gorbachev's glasnost society placed enormous public pressure on police forces to catch the killer, and general police patrols were stepped up, with Burakov targeting likely areas with undercover police in an attempt to flush out the killer. Chikatilo evaded capture narrowly, on a couple of occasions, but on November 6, 1990, fresh from killing his final victim, Sveta Korostik, his suspicious behavior was noted by patrolling policemen at the station nearby, and his details were taken. His name was linked to his previous arrest in 1984, and he was placed under surveillance.

Chikatilo was arrested on November 20, 1990, following more suspicious behavior, but he refused at first to confess to any of the killings.